Dr. Wieder talked about her original collaboration with Stanley Greenspan. She wanted to do outreach to underprivileged population. They started long term study of an underprivileged population to answer the question of how do you know that a child is “on track”? The first thing they learned was they had to deal with regulation and shared attention. They then realized they needed to learn more about language development and sensory integration and they brought in specialists in these fields. Then what the infant brings into the world, the individual differences. They created an intervention for children with developmental disorders, primarily ASD – DIR. “D” is for development, “I” is for individual differences, and “R” is for regulation.
Wieder states that the basis for development and for treating autism is developing reciprocal relationships between parent and child. DIR introduced a major paradigm shift in intervention from a focus on behavior to one on affect and relationships. The idea is affect is central to learning and that emotions drive early cognitive development. The approach involves treating relationships and not just the child. It assumes that every child has an inner world even if he or she cannot express it, that everyone has individual differences and therefore needs an intervention that specific to him or her, that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary, and that competencies come from experience instead of from training. These features of DIR distinguish it from the ESDM model as it is described. DIR proposes a structure to bring together a step-wise model of the developmental process with the individual features of the child, and features of the environmental, including the parents. There are 6 “core developmental stages or processes called The Functional Emotional Developmental Levels”.
Wieder also points to the biological/neurological origin of autism, referring to autism as a disorder of neural connectivity that interferes with the connection of affect and intention to the child’s ability to sequence actions and also to relate, communicate, and think (Just et al, 2004, 2007). When sensory motor processing and challenges in language comprehension and visual spatial knowledge derail development, emotion must be brought into the intervention as early as possible to strength the connection between sensation, affect, and motor action.
Dr. Wieder stresses that DIR initially emphasizes the relationship with the parent. She says that DIR has influenced the field; now behaviorists use developmental concepts and the two groups may be coming closer.